Will Trump win again???

[AMEHigh]

People should not be forcefully kept from bad decision making, they should be responsible for their choice good or bad

If you want to die early with a 128oz double big gulp in your hand, that’s on you

Interesting you say that but say that abortion should be illegal. Thus patients and doctors who participate in abortion care would go to jail. You can’t have it both ways. If people should not be kept from "bad decision making" your opinion should extend to all actions.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[pgg]

Hmmm, where do you live and where did you live basic civics—as to this misplaced notion that children don’t have basic and constitutionally based legal rights:
Minors also have rights under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, they have the right to equal protection, which means that every child is entitled to the same treatment at the hands of authority regardless of race, gender, disability, or religion. Children are also entitled to due process, which includes notice and a hearing, before any of their basic rights are taken away by the government.
Children with disabilities also have rights under the federal Disabilities Education Act. The Disabilities Education Act provides children in need of special education with special accommodations to ensure they receive the same education as their peers.

Either I need to add some smileys to my posts, or there's just no subtlety or humor in you lawyers at all.

Of course kids have rights. The point is that we make decisions for them, for their own good, because they're kids and we're adults.

 

[pgg]

Interesting you say that but say that abortion should be illegal. Thus patients and doctors who participate in abortion care would go to jail. You can’t have it both ways. If people should not be kept from "bad decision making" your opinion should extend to all actions.

You're deliberately misrepresenting his position and you know it. Don't do that.

I don't agree with the anti-abortion side, for reasons well documented in this thread. But if you accept (for the sake of argument!) that they're sincere in their stated belief that abortion is murder, there is nothing at all inconsistent in their advocacy for government intervention to stop it.

 

[BoolaHI]

Either I need to add some smileys to my posts, or there's just no subtlety or humor in you lawyers at all.

Of course kids have rights. The point is that we make decisions for them, for their own good, because they're kids and we're adults.

My bad —too much coffee and obviously, I’m quite too literal.

 

[Leon'sMom]

You need to get your facts straight, like many of the issues you frequently comment on, you are incorrect and not based in any fact....the author in question, pseudonym or not, is a real person - Daniel Ivandjiiski....see:Daniel Ivandjiiski - Wikipedia

What part of "Authored by Alan Dershowitz" are you not understanding? It was first published by The Hill and republished by ZeroHedge.
Author=Alan Dershowitz.

 

[Mikkel]

Interesting you say that but say that abortion should be illegal. Thus patients and doctors who participate in abortion care would go to jail. You can’t have it both ways. If people should not be kept from "bad decision making" your opinion should extend to all actions.

If you think that a 39 week old fetus is as much a person as a 39 week old gestation at the moment of birth, then the logical conclusion is that protections against child murder would apply to the fetus.

Arguing for being libertarian is a far cry from arguing for anarchy.

 

[BoolaHI]

What part of "Authored by Alan Dershowitz" are you not understanding? It was first published by The Hill and republished by ZeroHedge.
Author=Alan Dershowitz.

The article clearly states by—Tyler Durden, so it’s either shoddy journalistic standard or a misprint.

That said, AD views on impeachment are outliers and not followed or supported by most lawyers—period.


Dershowitz has idiosyncratic views on impeachment in a number of ways. He also takes a very restrictive view of what the constitutional phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” means and so regards a great deal of potential presidential misconduct as beyond the reach of the congressional impeachment power. This is the kind of argument that one would expect a defense lawyer for a target of an impeachment inquiry to make, but it is not a mainstream view—for good reason. I’ve written about that issue elsewhere. Let’s set that problem aside.
Separate from the question of what counts as an impeachable offense is who gets to decide what counts as an impeachable offense. The traditional answer to that question has been that Congress gets to decide. The House gets to choose who it wants to impeach, and in an impeachment trial the Senate gets to make the final judgment on whether the House’s action was justified. When the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the question of whether the Senate had properly conducted an impeachment trial in the case of Judge Walter Nixon, it firmly rebuffed that effort. Chief Justice William Rehnquist observed, “The parties do not offer evidence of a single word in the history of the Constitutional Convention or in contemporary commentary that even alludes to the possibility of judicial review in the context of the impeachment powers.” The entirety of the impeachment power, the Supreme Court ruled, was a political question firmly entrusted into the hands of the House and the Senate in exercising their “sole” power in that process and the courts had nothing to do with it. Of course, the House and the Senate could settle on a flawed interpretation of the constitutional impeachment power. It is just that Congress is unreviewable in this context, just as the Supreme Court is effectively unreviewable in the context of many other constitutional controversies.

Dershowitz thinks the Court got it wrong in the Nixon case and that Trump is just the president to get the justices to change their minds. If the president thought that the House had overstepped constitutional bounds by attempting to impeach him for something that is not an impeachable offense, he might file an immediate motion in the courts to try to enjoin a Senate trial. If that fails, the president might make a motion to the chief justice, who presides over the Senate trial, seeking to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the charges do not meet the legal definition of an impeachable offense. The chief justice as presiding officer in a presidential impeachment trial would be asked to declare that, given the House’s articles of impeachment, the senators could not properly vote to convict given their oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the law.” (However the presiding officer rules on such a motion, a majority of the senators could overturn that ruling. If a majority of the senators thought at that stage of the proceedings that no impeachable offenses were being charged on the face of the House’s articles, then acquittal is a foregone conclusion.)

In his latest foray, Dershowitz proposes the worst possible option. If the Senate holds a trial and convicts, Dershowitz suggests, the president should simply refuse to leave office and insist that the Supreme Court adjudicate his claim that his conviction violated the Constitution. Dershowitz stakes out the strongest possible claim for judicial supremacy. The Supreme Court and the Supreme Court alone should resolve all disagreements about constitutional meaning, and the president should simply defy Congress until the court intercedes.

To be clear, Dershowitz is encouraging the president to instigate a constitutional crisis in the hopes that it will force the Supreme Court’s hand in a way that might benefit the president. Why he thinks as either a legal or political matter the justices would want to back a president who defied a conviction by two-thirds of the sitting senators and was refusing to voluntarily leave the White House is not at all clear. Why he thinks that a president who had been encouraged to refuse to accept his conviction and removal by the Senate would suddenly acquiesce to the judgment of a court that affirmed his conviction and removal is perhaps even less clear. Why he thinks that advising a president who likes to reflect on having the support of “the tough people” who could make things “very bad, very bad” if pushed beyond “a certain point” that he could reasonably refuse to leave office after his conviction in a Senate trial is bewildering.

 

[deleted171991]

Like you, I am not an anarchist. Nobody really likes anarchists, but being a (small) minority party of individual liberty lovers, Libertarians are generally more accepting of harmlessly quirky and weird people, so they tend to gravitate toward the Libertarian party and we're not very good at showing them the way out.

I like civilization. I accept taxes as the cost of living in one. So do most libertarians. I want to live in a civilization where old and sick people don't die homeless in the gutter, even if their condition is largely self-inflicted. I'm reluctant to cast stones at anyone who does dumb self destructive things. The reasons why are too variable, and the truth is all of us do dumb things sometimes. I'm willing to pay something for their comfort and dignity.

I think trying to bill them directly in advance via sin taxes, as if society was trying to do separate checks for a 73 person dinner party, eleven years in advance when the restaurant hasn't even been chosen yet, is not the best approach.

My favorite magazine is... Reason. My second (or maybe second first) is Business Week. My third is The Atlantic. Time magazine makes me roll my eyes (I am surprised I can still move them). I read a good amount from Drudge Report, NY Times and the Washington Post.

Now you know everything about me.

 

[deleted171991]

Interesting you say that but say that abortion should be illegal. Thus patients and doctors who participate in abortion care would go to jail. You can’t have it both ways. If people should not be kept from "bad decision making" your opinion should extend to all actions.

When one is young, everything is crystal clear, black or white, no shades of grey. I think we've all been there.

 

[deleted171991]

The article clearly states by—Tyler Durden, so it’s either shoddy journalistic standard or a misprint.

That said, AD views on impeachment are outliers and not followed or supported by most lawyers—period.


Dershowitz has idiosyncratic views on impeachment in a number of ways. He also takes a very restrictive view of what the constitutional phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” means and so regards a great deal of potential presidential misconduct as beyond the reach of the congressional impeachment power. This is the kind of argument that one would expect a defense lawyer for a target of an impeachment inquiry to make, but it is not a mainstream view—for good reason. I’ve written about that issue elsewhere. Let’s set that problem aside.
Separate from the question of what counts as an impeachable offense is who gets to decide what counts as an impeachable offense. The traditional answer to that question has been that Congress gets to decide. The House gets to choose who it wants to impeach, and in an impeachment trial the Senate gets to make the final judgment on whether the House’s action was justified. When the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the question of whether the Senate had properly conducted an impeachment trial in the case of Judge Walter Nixon, it firmly rebuffed that effort. Chief Justice William Rehnquist observed, “The parties do not offer evidence of a single word in the history of the Constitutional Convention or in contemporary commentary that even alludes to the possibility of judicial review in the context of the impeachment powers.” The entirety of the impeachment power, the Supreme Court ruled, was a political question firmly entrusted into the hands of the House and the Senate in exercising their “sole” power in that process and the courts had nothing to do with it. Of course, the House and the Senate could settle on a flawed interpretation of the constitutional impeachment power. It is just that Congress is unreviewable in this context, just as the Supreme Court is effectively unreviewable in the context of many other constitutional controversies.

Dershowitz thinks the Court got it wrong in the Nixon case and that Trump is just the president to get the justices to change their minds. If the president thought that the House had overstepped constitutional bounds by attempting to impeach him for something that is not an impeachable offense, he might file an immediate motion in the courts to try to enjoin a Senate trial. If that fails, the president might make a motion to the chief justice, who presides over the Senate trial, seeking to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the charges do not meet the legal definition of an impeachable offense. The chief justice as presiding officer in a presidential impeachment trial would be asked to declare that, given the House’s articles of impeachment, the senators could not properly vote to convict given their oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the law.” (However the presiding officer rules on such a motion, a majority of the senators could overturn that ruling. If a majority of the senators thought at that stage of the proceedings that no impeachable offenses were being charged on the face of the House’s articles, then acquittal is a foregone conclusion.)

In his latest foray, Dershowitz proposes the worst possible option. If the Senate holds a trial and convicts, Dershowitz suggests, the president should simply refuse to leave office and insist that the Supreme Court adjudicate his claim that his conviction violated the Constitution. Dershowitz stakes out the strongest possible claim for judicial supremacy. The Supreme Court and the Supreme Court alone should resolve all disagreements about constitutional meaning, and the president should simply defy Congress until the court intercedes.

To be clear, Dershowitz is encouraging the president to instigate a constitutional crisis in the hopes that it will force the Supreme Court’s hand in a way that might benefit the president. Why he thinks as either a legal or political matter the justices would want to back a president who defied a conviction by two-thirds of the sitting senators and was refusing to voluntarily leave the White House is not at all clear. Why he thinks that a president who had been encouraged to refuse to accept his conviction and removal by the Senate would suddenly acquiesce to the judgment of a court that affirmed his conviction and removal is perhaps even less clear. Why he thinks that advising a president who likes to reflect on having the support of “the tough people” who could make things “very bad, very bad” if pushed beyond “a certain point” that he could reasonably refuse to leave office after his conviction in a Senate trial is bewildering.

Maybe you can explain to a layman what the heck is so impressive about Dershowitz. Every time I hear him, I feel like I'm wasting time, not that I am listening to a guru. I don't care about the H-word, no offense.

 

[BoolaHI]

Maybe you can explain to a layman what the heck is so impressive about Dershowitz. Every time I hear him, I feel like I'm wasting time, not that I am listening to a guru. I don't care about the H-word, no offense.

Now I’m not saying AD is not smart, but more than smart, is his ubiquitous self promotion. Further, his is an exercise of epic putative affect. Much of his current schtick is to remain relevant and within the consciousness of the American public- like I previously said, his views are not widely help within the legal community.

 

[BoolaHI]

My favorite magazine is... Reason. My second (or maybe second first) is Business Week. My third is The Atlantic. Time magazine makes me roll my eyes (I am surprised I can still move them). I read a good amount from Drudge Report, NY Times and the Washington Post.

Now you know everything about me.

For me: economist, financial times, nyt, national review (keep it balanced ) and the Atlantic.

 

[deleted480308]

While I completely understand why this would be the most just answer, history shows it doesn't work, especially in a free, democratic, and civilized society.

Good government, like good anything (e.g. anesthesia care), foresees and prevents the problems. Do you like leaving the garbage to rot on the street, like a true libertarian (i.e. not my garbage), or do you like when it's collected in a timely fashion? And don't you love when we have public bins at regular intervals, and even plastic bags for pet feces, anything to incentivize the citizen to do the right thing? That's a governmental intervention. Not all of them are bad.

I pay for trash pickup or the guy doesn’t come to my house. And you can simply arrest/fine the person littering, libertarianism doesn’t allow for trashing the public square or other’s property

Making you buy me copd meds and oxygen because I chose to smoke or have bad genetics is not at all the same thing

 

[deleted480308]

Interesting you say that but say that abortion should be illegal. Thus patients and doctors who participate in abortion care would go to jail. You can’t have it both ways. If people should not be kept from "bad decision making" your opinion should extend to all actions.

Murder isn’t just “bad decision making”. You are making a crap straw man

 

[deleted171991]

I pay for trash pickup or the guy doesn’t come to my house. And you can simply arrest/fine the person littering, libertarianism doesn’t allow for trashing the public square or other’s property

Making you buy me copd meds and oxygen because I chose to smoke or have bad genetics is not at all the same thing

Arrest or fine is a negative incentive, like a soda tax. You could argue that health is private, while garbage is public (not when the genius who ignores his health becomes a public burden).

So pure libertarianism doesn't work, for the same reason 100% free markets probably won't be as good as 90% free ones. The question is where to draw the line, because a line must be drawn. Freedom vs security (in all its meanings).

Humans are animals of the not so decent kind. Laissez-faire usually doesn't work that well.

 

[BoolaHI]

And if you think the Supremes are in lockstep and a slam dunk for Trumps interest - this is a very telling interview by Gorsuch. In short, our republic and moreover the constitution makes very clear instruction and emphasis on separated branches of government and an intrinsic check and balance—see: Justice Neil Gorsuch in 'Fox & Friends' interview: Pay attention to 'separation of powers'

 

[deleted480308]

Arrest or fine is a negative incentive, like a soda tax. You could argue that health is private, while garbage is public (not when the genius who ignores his health becomes a public burden).

So pure libertarianism doesn't work, for the same reason 100% free markets probably won't be as good as 90% free ones. The question is where to draw the line, because a line must be drawn. Freedom vs security (in all its meanings).

Humans are animals of the not so decent kind. Laissez-faire usually doesn't work that well.

Libertarianism works just fine in healthcare, we just have to let people handle their own decisions for better or worse

 

[vector2]

And if you think the Supremes are in lockstep and a slam dunk for Trumps interest - this is a very telling interview by Gorsuch. In short, our republic and moreover the constitution makes very clear instruction and emphasis on separated branches of government and an intrinsic check and balance—see: Justice Neil Gorsuch in 'Fox & Friends' interview: Pay attention to 'separation of powers'

I’m sure many (of the relatively younger) conservatives and liberals on the bench realize that they will be around long, long after trump is a forgotten shtstain on the tapestry of early 21st century American history. My guess is that the conservatives do not want to be remembered in the history books as totally partisan trump toadies the way that Moscow Mitch is and will be remembered after the senate trial is over.

If you want a lesson in integrity, look no further than US v. Nixon. Nixon appointed Burger and yet Burger and the rest of the bunch still forced Nixon to release the tapes.

 

[d9sccr]

I’m sure many (of the relatively younger) conservatives and liberals on the bench realize that they will be around long, long after trump is a forgotten shtstain on the tapestry of early 21st century American history. My guess is that the conservatives do not want to be remembered in the history books as totally partisan trump toadies the way that Moscow Mitch is and will be remembered after the senate trial is over.

If you want a lesson in integrity, look no further than US v. Nixon. Nixon appointed Burger and yet Burger and the rest of the bunch still forced Nixon to release the tapes.

As it should be. The courts should be impartial and not used to cram down political policies, unfortunately that’s not been the case.

 

[deleted171991]

More lies, more hyperbole, more chest-banging:

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/12/Letter-from-President-Trump-final.pdf

 

[deleted171991]

@d9sccr, regarding your deleted question: I am not a republican, I am an independent.

Most (current) republicans don't read The Atlantic, the Washington Post and the NY Times. I also don't watch Faux News (anymore).

 

[vector2]

 

[d9sccr]

@d9sccr, regarding your deleted question: I am not a republican, I am an independent.

Most (current) republicans don't read The Atlantic, the Washington Post and the NY Times. I also don't watch Faux News (anymore).

I just had some genuine questions but figured it could be taken poorly and we’ve had enough non-constructive “discussion”

 

[Mikkel]

"The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the [Office of Inspector General] report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above," Collyer wrote in her four-page order. "The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable."

 

[vector2]

Yea, this is totally a guy who the American people don’t need to hear from under oath...

Giuliani Provides Details of What Trump Knew About Ambassador’s Removal (Published 2019)

Rudolph Giuliani said in an interview that he briefed the president “a couple of times” about Marie Yovanovitch, the envoy to Ukraine, setting her recall in motion.

www.nytimes.com

Yeah, the Letter. But Today's Biggest Trump News Came Out of a Court Room in New York.

A $1 million "loan" from a Russia-friendly Ukrainian oligarch to Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas's wife just blew open the case further.

www.esquire.com

 

[Mikkel]

Yea, this is totally a guy who the American people don’t need to hear from under oath...

Giuliani Provides Details of What Trump Knew About Ambassador’s Removal (Published 2019)

Rudolph Giuliani said in an interview that he briefed the president “a couple of times” about Marie Yovanovitch, the envoy to Ukraine, setting her recall in motion.

www.nytimes.com

Yeah, the Letter. But Today's Biggest Trump News Came Out of a Court Room in New York.

A $1 million "loan" from a Russia-friendly Ukrainian oligarch to Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas's wife just blew open the case further.

www.esquire.com

How about Biden?

 

[vector2]

If Moscow Mitch and the Republicans want to embarrass themselves with the spectacle of putting the Bidens on the stand, so be it if that’s the price that has to be paid to hear from Mulvaney, Giuliani, Bolton, Pompeo etc under oath.

 

[BoolaHI]

Oh, Rudy.....

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, described how he passed along to Mr. Trump “a couple of times” accounts about how the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, had frustrated efforts that could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump. They included investigations involving former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ukrainians who disseminated documents that damaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. The president in turn connected Mr. Giuliani with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who asked for more information, Mr. Giuliani said. Within weeks, Ms. Yovanovitch was recalled as ambassador at the end of April and was told that Mr. Trump had lost trust in her.... Mr. Giuliani’s account, in an interview with the New York Times on Monday evening, provided additional detail about the president’s knowledge of and involvement in one element of a pressure campaign against Ukraine.

see:Giuliani Calls Up New York Times to Incriminate Trump

 

[deleted171991]

I just had some genuine questions but figured it could be taken poorly and we’ve had enough non-constructive “discussion”

No worries.

 

[deleted171991]

The Kindle version of How Democracies Die is on sale today for $3. It's one of the best non-fiction books I have read in a while (I've just read 25% of it in one sitting, couldn't put it down). Very on-topic.

It's an eye-opening book (even for some cult members). It uses history to explain how democratically-elected authoritarians destroy countries. I bet you guys didn't know that Chavez was democratically-elected in a previously democratic country. Same for Hitler, Mussolini and a long list of dictators.

Democracies tend to die much faster than you'd think, people just don't notice the slow but constant change. Just remember what "normal" used to be before Trump, before 2015, and what we call normal today. If every day is just 1% worse than the previous, in a year it will be 37 times worse. Food for thought.

 

[Leon'sMom]

"The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the [Office of Inspector General] report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above," Collyer wrote in her four-page order. "The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable."

Some of us are ready for the truth to be told. Others are still asleep.

Is Declas coming? Are indictments coming?

Oh, golly gee, shucks. Comey better lawyer up.

 

[ShockIndex]

My guess is that Bloomberg has "calculated" a way to winning the primaries that doesn't include Iowa and New Hampshire. The guy is extremely data-oriented. I have a feeling that the country will like the idea of having somebody cerebral like him being CEO, as long as he's socially moderate.

Bloomberg is polling poorly in SC as well, and I’m not aware of an instance where someone lost IA, NH, and SC and gone on to win a nomination from either party. Bill Clinton lost IA and NH, but his strong second place finish in NH propelled him to victory in all of the Super Tuesday states in the South.

Biden, despite his faults, is still the man to beat. He is now polling in the top 2 in IA and leading NH and SC. His 10-point margin in popular support will be hard to beat.

 

[Lawpy]

For me: economist, financial times, nyt, national review (keep it balanced ) and the Atlantic.

I read The Economist and Financial Times too. Great sources to get up to date and stay informed but some of the articles have obvious biases that i disagree.

 

[Leon'sMom]

Don't know if these allegations are true...

Bloomberg Responded ‘Kill It’ after Employee Disclosed Her Pregnancy, 1997 Lawsuit Alleges | National Review

Bloomberg defends treatment of women at media empire despite multiple lawsuits

 

[Lawpy]

Opinion | The Democrats Could Re-Elect Trump in 2020

On the campaign trail he’ll say they’ve been out to get him from his first day in office. He won’t be wrong.

www.wsj.com

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

The Kindle version of How Democracies Die is on sale today for $3. It's one of the best non-fiction books I have read in a while (I've just read 25% of it in one sitting, couldn't put it down). Very on-topic.

It's an eye-opening book (even for some cult members). It uses history to explain how democratically-elected authoritarians destroy countries. I bet you guys didn't know that Chavez was democratically-elected in a previously democratic country. Same for Hitler, Mussolini and a long list of dictators.

Democracies tend to die much faster than you'd think, people just don't notice the slow but constant change. Just remember what "normal" used to be before Trump, before 2015, and what we call normal today. If every day is just 1% worse than the previous, in a year it will be 37 times worse. Food for thought.

None of those countries have the history of stable government that we do. Stable despite a civil war, 2 world wars, a massive depression, and the cold war.

Keep in mind one of the prime focuses of the Founders was to prevent tyrants from screwing up the country.

 

[deleted171991]

None of those countries have the history of stable government that we do. Stable despite a civil war, 2 world wars, a massive depression, and the cold war.

Keep in mind one of the prime focuses of the Founders was to prevent tyrants from screwing up the country.

I'm sorry, but that's just wishful thinking. The book shows that our institutions have never broken down before the way they did under Trump. There are 4 bad signs that herald the arrival of an autocracy: we have all 4 now, which had never happened before in American history. It didn't start with Trump. It started with the Gingrich Congress. The Clinton impeachment was a joke of an impeachment done under partisan lines (impeaching a president for infidelity, and lying about said infidelity). That's when the breakdown started.

Read the book. I am now at 50%. Trump is the "perfect" storm. It's not fearmongering; it's history. And you don't see it coming unless you look for it. Dictatorship happens very fast, even in a pseudodemocratic way nowadays, where the country looks like a democracy to the naked eye, but all the institutions have been corrupted (e.g. Hungary or Russia). We should all be very cautious and afraid for America.

"The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election. Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud. Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that millions of illegal immigrants and dead people on the voting rolls would be mobilized to vote for Clinton. For months, his campaign website declared “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!” In August, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged….I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” In October, he tweeted, “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day.” During the final presidential debate, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he were defeated.

According to historian Douglas Brinkley, no major presidential candidate had cast such doubt on the democratic system since 1860. Only in the run-up to the Civil War did we see major politicians “delegitimizing the federal government” in this way. As Brinkley put it, “That’s a secessionist, revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart entirely.” And Trump’s words mattered—a lot. A Politico/Morning Consult poll carried out in mid-October found that 41 percent of Americans, and 73 percent of Republicans, believed that the election could be stolen from Trump. In other words, three out of four Republicans were no longer certain that they were living under a democratic system with free elections.

The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,” challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a “criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!”

The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence. Partisan violence is very often a precursor of democratic breakdown. Prominent examples include the Blackshirts in Italy, the Brownshirts in Germany, the emergence of leftist guerrillas in Uruguay, and the rise of right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in early-1960s Brazil. In the last century, no major-party presidential candidate has ever endorsed violence (George Wallace did in 1968, but he was a third-party candidate). Trump broke this pattern. During the campaign, Trump not only tolerated violence among his supporters but at times appeared to revel in it. In a radical break with established norms of civility, Trump embraced—and even encouraged—supporters who physically assaulted protesters. He offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched and threatened to kill a protester at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On other occasions, he responded to protesters at his rallies by inciting violence among his supporters. Here are a few examples, compiled by Vox.

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would ya? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you I will pay the legal fees. I promise.” (February 1, 2016, Iowa)​

“I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true…. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” (February 22, 2016, Nevada)​

“In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But today, everybody’s politically correct. Our country’s going to hell with being politically correct.” (February 26, 2016, Oklahoma)​

“Get out of here. Get out. Out! This is amazing. So much fun. I love it. I love it. We having a good time? USA, USA, USA! All right, get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it….We had four guys, they jumped on him, they were swinging and swinging. The next day, we got killed in the press—that we were too rough. Give me a break. You know? Right? We don’t want to be too politically correct anymore. Right, folks?” (March 4, 2016, Michigan)​

“We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I mean, they started punching back. In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it so easily again. But today, they walk in and they put their hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.” (March 9, 2016, North Carolina)​

In August 2016, Trump issued a veiled endorsement of violence against Hillary Clinton, telling supporters at a Wilmington, North Carolina, rally that a Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court could result in the abolition of the right to bear arms. He went on to say, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks….Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics. One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those—in the opposition, media, or civil society—who criticize them. Donald Trump displayed such a readiness in 2016. He said he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton after the election and declared that Clinton should be imprisoned. Trump also repeatedly threatened to punish unfriendly media. At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, declaring, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They are going to have such problems.” Describing the media as “among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met,” Trump declared:

​

I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money….So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace—or when the Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them….​

With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century. As Table 2 shows, Donald Trump met them all. No other major presidential candidate in modern U.S. history, including Nixon, has demonstrated such a weak public commitment to constitutional rights and democratic norms. Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other founders when they created the American presidency."

This quote is just a drop in the ocean of historical warnings. The whole book is worth reading. It's an amazing proof that we have never been so endangered, and that our Constitution is as fragile as other countries'. For example, the way he's packing the courts is also a typical part of "transitioning" from democracy to autocracy. And when a country becomes as polarized as we are now, bad stuff happens (we haven't been like this since before the Civil War). And if you watch Trump, you can see that he's becoming less tolerant of the democratic rules, more impatient and more hateful as months pass. Read his letter to Pelosi; it drips of hate. That's not a democratic president. If he gets re-elected, he will use it as a mandate to become an autocrat; expect the worst. The Constitution is worthless if the courts are packed with people who don't apply it, if the white becomes black and the black white, as in 1984. Or in all the autocratic countries. To quote Gorsuch, North Korea has an amazing bill of rights, better than ours, it's just not worth the ink it's written in. All the democratic stuff doesn't matter when a nation becomes as polarized as we are and doesn't defend the democratic institutions in a bipartisan way (that's how we resisted to FDR, who was a much better quality individual - and still we came up with the 22nd amendment, so that he won't happen again).

See you in the gulag.

P.S. The How Democracies Die ebook is still $2.99 on Amazon.

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

Perhaps I didn't state my point as well as I thought, let me make another attempt.

Donald Trump would gladly become a tyrant if he could. You are also correct in that Trump shows all the signs that, historically, dictators have shown.

But, and this was my point, none of those tyrants were in America. None of them had governments designed specifically to prevent tyrants from gaining power. That's why I'm not worried about it. It has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with the very foundation of our government.

Now that being said, given enough time could Trump conceivably overthrow our way of government and set himself up as Leader? Sure, anything is possible. But there are a huge number of safeguards built into our system to prevent exactly that from happening. Besides that, he couldn't even get a new healthcare bill passed when his party controlled both houses of Congress but you think he's a true threat to our government?

As for "packing the courts", nope not really. Trump is on track to have appointed as many judges as HW Bush (our most recent 1 term president). He's got more Circuit Court judges (if looked at on a per-year basis) than Obama but on track to be similar to W and Clinton if he wins a 2nd term and a large part of that was the GOP not allowing Obama's nominations through.

 

[pgg]

I have a hard time taking Democrat claims that we're on the brink of a Trumpian dictatorship seriously, when they're working so hard to disarm the public because the government isn't a threat.

I'll concede that I've never lived in such a country so its possible I'm just not seeing the signs. But I'm not connecting enough dots.

The press remains free. I don't want to make the mistake of confusing actual media suppression with mere ****-talking about the media and the gullibility of some voters who believe said ****-talking.

Election results have been honored, including a major midterm election less than a year ago that saw large gains made at the state and federal level by the party opposed to the alleged would-be dictator.

Citizens are well armed. Anyone who isn't, but wants to be, can become so. And again, it's the party that ISN'T in power that's working hard to disarm citizens.

Unemployment is very low.

A free press, functioning elections, armed citizenry, and strong economy just don't seem to be near a slippery slope, much less on it. That's not to say I'm pleased with the overall state of our government, but there's an election in 11 months and so far I have no reason to think our system won't keep on working.

 

[Mikkel]

I'm sorry, but that's just wishful thinking. The book shows that our institutions have never broken down before the way they did under Trump. There are 4 bad signs that herald the arrival of an autocracy: we have all 4 now, which had never happened before in American history. It didn't start with Trump. It started with the Gingrich Congress. The Clinton impeachment was a joke of an impeachment done under partisan lines (impeaching a president for infidelity, and lying about said infidelity). That's when the breakdown started.

Read the book. I am now at 50%. Trump is the "perfect" storm. It's not fearmongering; it's history. And you don't see it coming unless you look for it. Dictatorship happens very fast, even in a pseudodemocratic way nowadays, where the country looks like a democracy to the naked eye, but all the institutions have been corrupted (e.g. Hungary or Russia). We should all be very cautious and afraid for America.

"The first sign is a weak commitment to the democratic rules of the game. Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election. Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud. Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that millions of illegal immigrants and dead people on the voting rolls would be mobilized to vote for Clinton. For months, his campaign website declared “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!” In August, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged….I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” In October, he tweeted, “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day.” During the final presidential debate, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he were defeated.

According to historian Douglas Brinkley, no major presidential candidate had cast such doubt on the democratic system since 1860. Only in the run-up to the Civil War did we see major politicians “delegitimizing the federal government” in this way. As Brinkley put it, “That’s a secessionist, revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart entirely.” And Trump’s words mattered—a lot. A Politico/Morning Consult poll carried out in mid-October found that 41 percent of Americans, and 73 percent of Republicans, believed that the election could be stolen from Trump. In other words, three out of four Republicans were no longer certain that they were living under a democratic system with free elections.

The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,” challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a “criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!”

The third criterion is toleration or encouragement of violence. Partisan violence is very often a precursor of democratic breakdown. Prominent examples include the Blackshirts in Italy, the Brownshirts in Germany, the emergence of leftist guerrillas in Uruguay, and the rise of right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in early-1960s Brazil. In the last century, no major-party presidential candidate has ever endorsed violence (George Wallace did in 1968, but he was a third-party candidate). Trump broke this pattern. During the campaign, Trump not only tolerated violence among his supporters but at times appeared to revel in it. In a radical break with established norms of civility, Trump embraced—and even encouraged—supporters who physically assaulted protesters. He offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched and threatened to kill a protester at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. On other occasions, he responded to protesters at his rallies by inciting violence among his supporters. Here are a few examples, compiled by Vox.

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would ya? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you I will pay the legal fees. I promise.” (February 1, 2016, Iowa)​

“I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. It’s true…. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” (February 22, 2016, Nevada)​

“In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But today, everybody’s politically correct. Our country’s going to hell with being politically correct.” (February 26, 2016, Oklahoma)​

“Get out of here. Get out. Out! This is amazing. So much fun. I love it. I love it. We having a good time? USA, USA, USA! All right, get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it….We had four guys, they jumped on him, they were swinging and swinging. The next day, we got killed in the press—that we were too rough. Give me a break. You know? Right? We don’t want to be too politically correct anymore. Right, folks?” (March 4, 2016, Michigan)​

“We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I mean, they started punching back. In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it so easily again. But today, they walk in and they put their hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.” (March 9, 2016, North Carolina)​

In August 2016, Trump issued a veiled endorsement of violence against Hillary Clinton, telling supporters at a Wilmington, North Carolina, rally that a Clinton appointee to the Supreme Court could result in the abolition of the right to bear arms. He went on to say, “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks….Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

The final warning sign is a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of rivals and critics. One thing that separates contemporary autocrats from democratic leaders is their intolerance of criticism, and their readiness to use their power to punish those—in the opposition, media, or civil society—who criticize them. Donald Trump displayed such a readiness in 2016. He said he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton after the election and declared that Clinton should be imprisoned. Trump also repeatedly threatened to punish unfriendly media. At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, declaring, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They are going to have such problems.” Describing the media as “among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met,” Trump declared:

​

I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money….So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace—or when the Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them….​

With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century. As Table 2 shows, Donald Trump met them all. No other major presidential candidate in modern U.S. history, including Nixon, has demonstrated such a weak public commitment to constitutional rights and democratic norms. Trump was precisely the kind of figure that had haunted Hamilton and other founders when they created the American presidency."

This quote is just a drop in the ocean of historical warnings. The whole book is worth reading. It's an amazing proof that we have never been so endangered, and that our Constitution is as fragile as other countries'. For example, the way he's packing the courts is also a typical part of "transitioning" from democracy to autocracy. And when a country becomes as polarized as we are now, bad stuff happens (we haven't been like this since before the Civil War). And if you watch Trump, you can see that he's becoming less tolerant of the democratic rules, more impatient and more hateful as months pass. Read his letter to Pelosi; it drips of hate. That's not a democratic president. If he gets re-elected, he will use it as a mandate to become an autocrat; expect the worst. The Constitution is worthless if the courts are packed with people who don't apply it, if the white becomes black and the black white, as in 1984. Or in all the autocratic countries. To quote Gorsuch, North Korea has an amazing bill of rights, better than ours, it's just not worth the ink it's written in. All the democratic stuff doesn't matter when a nation becomes as polarized as we are and doesn't defend the democratic institutions in a bipartisan way (that's how we resisted to FDR, who was a much better quality individual - and still we came up with the 22nd amendment, so that he won't happen again).

See you in the gulag.

P.S. The How Democracies Die ebook is still $2.99 on Amazon.

That is an incredibly biased assessment from the point of view of someone who ignores that the left is advocating for:

Silencing critics
Abolishing first amendment
Abolishing second amendment
Abolishing electoral college
Seizure of wealth
Takeover of all healthcare
Destroying lives of government critics
Use of secret police to spy on rivals
Corruption of the leadership of the FBI



Trump is actually fighting AGAINST the tyranny that Democrats are salivating over to create (Warren, Sanders, Obama, Oroarke, Steyer, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff).



BTW, citing the second amendment as an endorsement of autocracy is absolutely ABSURD.

 

[deleted171991]

@pgg, @VA Hopeful Dr, let's talk some more in 2021. I am not as optimistic as you are. The two parties and their bases have never hated each other this much. This is when democracy breaks down.

In the meanwhile, please remember the fable about the boiling frog.

 

[Mikkel]

@pgg, @VA Hopeful Dr, let's talk some more in 2021. I am not as optimistic as you are. The two parties and their bases have never hated each other this much. This is when democracy breaks down.

In the meanwhile, please remember the fable about the boiling frog.

The two parties don't hate each other, it's just that the fruits of intersectionality are finally here.

If you're white, Christian, male, conservative, and heterosexual, you are definitely considered the enemy of the left deserving of all the bad that they could imagine. "Racist, islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, you name it."

Uniting others to attack another group is the modus operandi of the left for decades.

If the right ever said what the left said about specific groups of people, you would have explosive outrage.

 

[BoolaHI]

@pgg, @VA Hopeful Dr, let's talk some more in 2021. I am not as optimistic as you are. The two parties and their bases have never hated each other this much. This is when democracy breaks down.

In the meanwhile, please remember the fable about the boiling frog.

Not sure about that...as it fairly subjective relative to other periods of history. That said, What 19th century politics can teach us about today

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

@pgg, @VA Hopeful Dr, let's talk some more in 2021. I am not as optimistic as you are. The two parties and their bases have never hated each other this much. This is when democracy breaks down.

In the meanwhile, please remember the fable about the boiling frog.

Meh. If he refuses to leave should he lose next year or in 2025 when his 2nd term is up then I'll be glad to come back here and eat my serving of crow. Otherwise I'm not concerned. You can't really be a dictator if you leave when your term is up.

 

[Matty44]

The two parties don't hate each other, it's just that the fruits of intersectionality are finally here.

If you're white, Christian, male, conservative, and heterosexual, you are definitely considered the enemy of the left deserving of all the bad that they could imagine. "Racist, islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, you name it."

Uniting others to attack another group is the modus operandi of the left for decades.

If the right ever said what the left said about specific groups of people, you would have explosive outrage.

Yup. Just a 20 sec clip of the standard accepted progressive view of white people...
@1:15

Sad.

 

[Lawpy]

The culture wars are what's dividing Americans.

 

[BoolaHI]

Yup. Just a 20 sec clip of the standard accepted progressive view of white people...
@1:15

Sad.

Wow, way to take snippets and curated editorial film selection and apply it to everyone without exception. As to the comments of Thanksgiving being racists, hello, do you know by and large Thanksgiving from an actual historical perspective is largely fictional an invention and an aspirational narrative. As an enrolled tribal member (Mississippi Choctaw) it is a profound piece of propaganda and does not accurately reflect actual history.

Do American Indians Celebrate Thanksgiving?

How do Native Americans make peace with a national holiday that romanticizes the 1621 encounter between their ancestors and English settlers, and erases the deadly conflicts that followed?

www.smithsonianmag.com

The Invention of Thanksgiving

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

www.newyorker.com

 

[BoolaHI]

Mr. Gergen ( who has worked for 4 R White Houses) thank you for the concise and cogent statement—Trump is acting like "a two-bit dictator of a banana republic" with attack letter to Pelosi, former presidential adviser says

 

[Mikkel]

Mr. Gergen ( who has worked for 4 R White Houses) thank you for the concise and cogent statement—Trump is acting like "a two-bit dictator of a banana republic" with attack letter to Pelosi, former presidential adviser says

Trump's letter is speaking truth to power.

 

[Mikkel]

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme—yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

Your first claim, “Abuse of Power,” is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted, mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: “I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America’s interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.

You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense—it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.

You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: “I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars’…I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it “looked bad.” Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that it was a “good phone call,” that “I don’t feel pressure,” and explicitly stressed that “nobody pushed me.” The Ukrainian Foreign Minister stated very clearly: “I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance.” He also said there was “No Pressure.” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said: “At no time during this meeting…was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid.” Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did Ukraine complain about pressure being applied—not once! Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: “No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on.”

The second claim, so-called “Obstruction of Congress,” is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation’s history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: “I can’t emphasize this enough…if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It’s your abuse of power. You’re doing precisely what you’re criticizing the President for doing.”

Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it! You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!

Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party’s impeachment effort has been going on for “two and a half years,” long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.” Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, “I’m going to fight every day until he’s impeached.” House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country’s best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports)—who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office, “We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherf****r.” Representative Al Green said in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.” Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

You and your party are desperate to distract from America’s extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans; a rebuilt military; a completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans; more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices; historic tax and regulation cuts; the elimination of the individual mandate; the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century; the first new branch of the United States Military since 1947, the Space Force; strong protection of the Second Amendment; criminal justice reform; a defeated ISIS caliphate and the killing of the world’s number one terrorist leader, al-Baghdadi; the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada); a breakthrough Phase One trade deal with China; massive new trade deals with Japan and South Korea; withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal; cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord; becoming the world’s top energy producer; recognition of Israel’s capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall—and that is just the beginning, there is so much more. You cannot defend your extreme policies—open borders, mass migration, high crime, crippling taxes, socialized healthcare, destruction of American energy, late-term taxpayer-funded abortion, elimination of the Second Amendment, radical far-left theories of law and justice, and constant partisan obstruction of both common sense and common good.

There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately, I don’t know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.

After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further. You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along, the phone call with Ukraine—even though it was a perfect call. And by the way, when I speak to foreign countries, there are many people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.

You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.

Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians—a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade—you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person. All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger—this is what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler’s challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with your party.

If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing the full truth concerning the FBI’s horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election—including the use of spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order to frame the innocent. The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that “all roads lead to Putin,” when you know that is an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.

Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment—against every shred of truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle—is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America’s Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up, but that didn’t stop you from continuing.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan—it is not. You said it was very divisive—it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible—and it will only get worse!

This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.

Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.

I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.

There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.

One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again.

Sincerely yours,

DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America